This section covers the shift from continuous deployment to intentional, tag-based releases with structured documentation, automated risk analysis, and environment-based promotion.

What’s here

• Intentional Release Guidelines – The “why.” Core principles, versioning policy, environment strategy, release documentation standards, and database migration policy.

• Intentional Release Workflow Guide – The “how.” Day-to-day developer workflow, CI pipeline behavior, GitOps architecture with ArgoCD and Kargo, validation gates, and rollback procedures.

• Database Migration Patterns Reference – The implementation details. Expand-Contract pattern with step-by-step Rails examples, migration analysis tooling (Strong Migrations, Squawk), and reference links.